Documents / Official release
This is a preliminary Part II transcript of the Gemini 5 (GT-5) flight crew debriefing, prepared by the Spacecraft Operations Branch of NASA's Flight Crew Support Division and dated September 2, 1965. It records astronauts Cooper and Conrad at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy. They discuss how the spacecraft systems worked, including the platform and the OAMS thruster failures. The transcript also covers operational checks, visual sightings, experiments, training, premission planning, and medical aspects. It was originally classified Confidential.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: August 30 - September 2, 1965, Cape Kennedy, Florida. This document is a preliminary transcript (Part II) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 5 flight crew technical debriefing. NASA conducted this debriefing between August 30, 1965, and September 2, 1965, at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida. Astronauts L. Gordon Cooper and Charles “Pete” Conrad described observing debris and “snow” and “all sorts of glittering pieces of this, that and the other thing” in the “Visual Sightings” section of the document (pages 157-220).
41 down and coming to a null out there , it appeared to s t art moving s omewhat at the same separation rate to the south of us slightly towards a trail position very slowly. We tracked it f or a long t ime . We were track ing it straight out and then all nf a sudden , it be- gan to loop around slightly to the lef t . Conrad It di d something like I 1 d never seen before! Cooper I 1 d never seen this happen in the simulator, and it still doesn ' t seem quite f easi ble to us that this could ever happen. Conrad One possible answer, and it ' s r elated to something that we saw later in the flight , Gordo , where we alined the platform and had -yaw error couple into roll . Might not this have given us bad steering in formation as far as our radar needles were concerned if the scanner wasn ' t working properly? We didn ' t have the platform alined right . We went along 30 minutes , almost one- third of an orbit . I f we di dn ' t have an alined platform, that would start coupling up in some other axis like roll and we woul d be off in yaw. Then when we thought we were pointing at the pole , we reall y weren't. Maybe it didn 1 t reall y drift behind us , maybe it stayed out on our wing. We must have put it out fairly well
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 325 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.